


Ain't That a Kick in the Head

by Chedddar



Category: Far Cry (Video Games), Far Cry 4
Genre: Betrayal, Blood and Injury, Gen, Gritty, Head Injury, Major Character Injury, Near Death Experiences, Prayer, Survival, Survival Horror, Torture, Wilderness Survival
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-03
Packaged: 2021-03-14 01:35:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29163510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chedddar/pseuds/Chedddar
Summary: In which Sabal is shot by Ajay on Amita's orders, but did not die....
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	Ain't That a Kick in the Head

Insect legs – so light, but so distinct. Sabal wondered why he could feel them. Why they danced on the roof of his mouth. Why they touched his throat. His throat….

Half-dead muscles flexed all at once in sudden protest. One cough expelled a pale moth into the bleary expanse of Sabal’s vision. It fluttered above him, a bright spot in indistinct darkness.

Pain struck him like a spike to the head. His first conscious breath came out as a groan. The moth flew out of sight, and he squeezed his eyes shut. Something wet trailed down his face in a single warm line. At his forehead, the cold air somehow set his nerves to burning. He cringed and heard his teeth grinding. Each breath drew stifled cries. With one hand, he fumbled over the rug beneath him, then the splintery wood behind his back. Feeling forward, he reached a familiar handle. His kukri? It had to be. He gripped it as fresh pain made him gasp.

The hair at the back of his head was soaked. Blood – he knew it was blood, knew it was his own. He willed his free hand upward, though the joints of his arm swung loosely like overgreased hinges. Ungraceful fingers found his face. The skin of his forehead was…interrupted….

“Why? Kyra, why?”

Why, he asked, his words hardly distinct from the groaning in between. Why would the gods see fit to leave him imprisoned in his own dead body? Above his brows rested a hole, a bullet wound. All memory of how it happened failed him. There was only a dullness in his hearing from what must have been a gunshot – close-range, perhaps point-blank.

Who had done this to him? It pained him even to move his eyes, but he squinted up, then down. He saw no one, only a dark ceiling, a few snuffed candles at his side. Some papers lay at his feet, pale as bone. He couldn’t remember what was written on them. He reached to take one, and suddenly his balance failed him. Falling onto his side proved more painful than he could have imagined. The impact coated the rug beneath him in a mixture of blood and…something that he prayed wasn’t spinal fluid. He couldn’t bear to look closely, as searing agony forced his eyes to squeeze shut. His limbs curled inward, both hands seizing his head as if to keep it from breaking open. He waited for the pain to relent, but it simply would not. For minutes, and then minutes more, and then another hour, he cursed, cried, prayed. His only answers were the darkness of night and the silence of an empty room. Barely half-conscious, he begged for the pain to end, for help. Finally, he begged for the mercy of death. Why had the gods not taken him already? Utterly desperate, he reached toward the hole in his head, that he might jam his fingers inside and deal himself the damage necessary to move on. But the terror of only magnifying his pain made him stop. Just as he paused, it began to fade. By fractions of degrees, the stabbing in his head grew dull. Slowly uncurling himself, he pressed his face to the cold floor, grateful for every sliver of relief. Pain felt like paradise compared to the nightmare of the past hour.

Bits of snow drifted in through an open doorway and slid dryly over the floor, too cold to stick and melt. The flakes caught in the folds of Sabal’s clothes, nestled in his hair and eyelashes. With each fresh draft, they collected a bit further, and a bit further. He wanted the cold to numb him, hoped that he might fall asleep and not wake up. His continued survival was nothing more than a mistake of chance – an insignificant delay of the inevitable. He was ready for the mistake to be corrected.

Distant voices dragged his glazed eyes fully open. They spoke in the dialect of Pagan Min’s northern-educated subjects, distinctly upper-class and almost certainly loyalist. Sabal had welcomed death only instants ago, but now he struggled for purchase on the floor, forcing frigid limbs to move. Enemies in red suits flashed over his mind’s eye. Images of torture chambers and dark cells were quick to follow. A door waited to his left, promising escape. His legs squirmed uselessly, but his arms pulled him over the floor. He reached further, staring up slack-jawed at the door handle, so close and yet so far….

Footsteps made him stop and lie flat. A single pair of boots entered at the other end of the room, framed in the open doorway. The figure wearing them was little more than a blur. His uniform was red – that much Sabal could see. That color urged him to act, to _fight_. Sabal could have closed in with his kukri and stuck this enemy down in one blow; he had done so before. But now…now….

Sabal laid still as if dead. His unblinking eyes remained fixed on the bare floorboards at the edge of the room. He felt another trail of blood slither from his perforated head to the ground. The man above him began to pace. Each boot-step against the floor felt like a blast, a shocking interruption to the past hours’ silence. Then the man shouted.

“One dead! It’s clear!”

Sabal flinched at the sudden noise, blinking not once but twice. He stilled again, bracing for the attack that might follow his lapse. None came; perhaps the man’s gaze had missed him in that moment.

A distant call returned the shout. Sabal couldn’t make out the words.

“Just go on ahead!” answered the man in the room. “Check the hills.”

Silence returned to the room. Only a faint glow pierced the darkness. Sabal dared a single glance to find that the man was holding a cell phone, pointing it in his direction. Two flashes followed. Each was accompanied with an artificial sound that resembled and old camera. Click, click.

The man shifted, dropping to one knee and turning away. He angled the camera above himself. In the blurred edges of his vision, Sabal could see himself and the red uniform reflected in the phone. Silhouetted in it’s glow was the man’s gloved fingers – a peace sign.

Sabal held up two fingers of his own. The rest gripped the handle of his kukri.

 _Click_.

**Author's Note:**

> Based on interest, I will most likely continue adding chapters until a full arc is written. I want to detail a whole lot of post-canon conflict and redemption for Sabal. Please comment and stay tuned, thanks!


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